Company knows when a machine will break before it happens

By GROVE POTTER

“I tell my friends, you can start a business in a garage in California or in a mansion in Buffalo.”

Ward Thomas, president and CEO

Sentient Science

What if someone designed a computer program that could predict,
with astonishing accuracy, when a machine would fail and how it
would happen? Businesses could act to make repairs before things
break, saving lots of money by extending the lives of their
machines.

That is precisely what Sentient Science has done, and the
company’s future looks very bright.

The company, which was lured to Buffalo by UB President Satish
K. Tripathi and other business leaders, is focused on the wind
turbine industry, where it currently monitors about 20,000 turbines
around the world. The company hopes to be monitoring 100,000
turbines by 2019.

The magic of Sentient Science’s program rests on its
receiving live-streaming data from each machine and on its focus on
materials science, knowing what the machines are made of down to
the molecular level. Other companies tackling machine life issues
rely purely on data, predicting failures based only on past
experience. Sentient’s focus on materials science gives it
the ability to predict how long individual components will last.
And each prediction is specific to each machine because the company
monitors how long each has been running and under what loads.

The company’s accuracy was proven by NASA. The space
agency had 30 years of data on how its equipment had run.

“They gave us just the information from 1980, and we
predicted the next 30 years of machine failures statistically
perfectly,” says Ward Thomas, president and CEO of the
company. “It was the first time in history something like
that had happened. It was a big day for us.”

The company then took its show on the road, doing similar tests
at Boeing, Sikorsky, GE, Siemens and others. “We knew one
validation was not enough, so we went to the biggest companies in
the world and did the same thing as at NASA,” Thomas says.
“We’re a non-traditional startup. We had 13 years
before we had our first commercial sale.”

Drawn to Buffalo

After NASA authenticated Sentient’s capabilities, and
after the company was honored at the White House with the Tibbets
Award for innovation, Sentient was in great demand. Several
universities vied for the opportunity to host it. After learning
about Buffalo’s emerging scientific business community and
UB’s commitment to materials science, Thomas, a Toronto
native, picked Buffalo as the place to grow the business.

“I believe we came at the right time when it was changing,
and it is changed,” Thomas says. “Buffalo is
fundamentally an incredible place. The materials science commitment
that Satish Tripathi has invested in with materials scientists,
which is why we’re here, it’s a mecca. There also are
14,000 processors (downtown at UB’s New York State Center of
Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences) that we use every
day in simulations. So the relationship with UB is one of strategic
nature.”

The company is headquartered in UB’s Jacobs Executive
Development Center (JEDC) in the former Butler Mansion on Delaware
Avenue.

“I tell my friends, you can start a business in a garage
in California or in a mansion in Buffalo,” Thomas says.

Lowering the cost of wind power

By extending the life of wind turbines, Sentient is lowering the
cost of wind power.

“We want to lower the cost of energy so wind turbines can
compete with coal,” Thomas explains. “That’s for
the planet, for the young people and to attract the
engineers.”

Sentient’s work is also in space on the Hubble telescope.
NASA needed help with the lubrication of the gyros on the system
that directs the telescope. The engineers at Sentient did not know
specifically what they were working on because it was classified,
but they came up with a gas lubricant for zero gravity that
extended the number of times the telescope can be repositioned.

“That would have taken 10 years of physical testing, but
they needed it fast and we were the technology the DoD (Department
of Defense) had invested in,” Thomas says.

Future growth

Sentient had three people working in the JEDC when the company
began operations here. It is up to 40 people now, and expects to
double that soon. “We’ll tap out of this building at
between 80 and 100, so we’re looking for other buildings.
Someday we’ll probably build our own building as the downtown
development continues,” Thomas says.

The company’s computer needs also are growing.

“We’re working with the university helping them
raise funds for more computer processors. We also envision putting
our own processors into the CCR (UB’s Center for
Computational Research),” he says. “It can house a lot
more processors, so between more state and federal investment for
the university, and when we have an IPO, we’ll be investing
back into the university as well.

“Our investment in tech is to make it more and more
efficient. The university has helped make our code more efficient
so it runs faster and doesn’t take up so much computing
power,” he says.

CCR Director Thomas R. Furlani says Sentient is one of 22
companies using a super computer funded by Empire State Development
to attract new businesses to the region. A proposal has been made
to double the computer capacity, he adds.

The CCR also has a larger supercomputer dedicated to just
academic uses.

Value proposition

The value of using Sentient is “life extension,”
Thomas says.

“The ability to see into the future can make it possible
to extend the life of a turbine from eight years to 30 years. That
extra 22 years is my value proposition. There is nothing on a
CEO’s desk for an initiative that can match that,” he
says.

When the company goes public in two to three years, Thomas
expects its valuation to be around $10 billion.

Sentient’s impact could reach far beyond wind turbines.
The company is working on airplane engines and tackling the
wheel-rail connection on freight trains. Thomas says Sentient may
be able to reduce the friction by more than 10 percent.

The ability to test the lifespans of machines while they are
being designed could also greatly speed product development and
make the lifespan of a machine a more important consideration in
the buying decision.

“Our tech levels the playing field so people for the first
time are not buying only for price and delivery,” Thomas
says. “They are buying for life.”